Thursday, December 6, 2018

An installation of digital video works by five contemporary Caribbean artists

Friday 7 December, 2018, 8 pm, at Alice Yard

Still from Marchons unis … (Let’s walk together…), by Maeksaens Denis

As part of The Caribbean Digital 2018 conference, on Friday 7 December Alice Yard will host an informal installation of digital video works by artists Di-Andre Caprice Davis (Jamaica), Maksaens Denis (Haiti), Asha Ganpat (T&T/USA), David Gumbs (Saint-Martin), and Rodell Warner (T&T). By placing their individual works “in conversation” with each other in our physical space, we hope to suggest affinities and sympathies among these artists from diverse Caribbean backgrounds.

Digital experimentation among artists in the Caribbean began as an alternate space of becoming as soon as the technology became accessible during the 1990s. For example, pioneering works came the from the live VJ public performances and experiments of Maksaens Denis moving between the raves of Europe and the streets of Haiti. Across the region and the diaspora, in response to traditional regulated territories, new prospects opened up and out for understanding our space. As artists, it brought us together and in communication with each other and expanded our visual vocabularies and ways of imagining. In this other place, somewhere between the actual and the virtual, it continues to expand.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Ebony G. Patterson, in collaboration with Alice Yard, is pleased to support the research and working residency of Jamaican artist Di-Andre Caprice Davis in Port of Spain during the month of October 2018.

On Thursday 25 October, the artist will present her current work in progress, NOT YOUR KIND OF ARTIST: Part 1 — Influences.

All are invited.

About the artist:

Di-Andre Caprice Davis was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She is a self-described experimental artist exploring new media technologies. Her work is primarily an exploration of form, engaging the opportunities afforded by new media to develop new languages that reflect a twenty-first century existence. Abstraction, computer graphics, GIF art, glitch art, mathematics, photography, science, surrealism, and videography are some of the fascinations that animate her practice. She has exhibited across the Caribbean and internationally. Notable exhibitions include the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Jamaica Biennial (2014 and 2017), and Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, United Kingdom (2016). At the 2017 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, she won the award for Best Experimental Film for her work Chaotic Beauty, 2016, which has also been shown at The Dean Collection’s No Commission show during Art Basel Miami Beach 2017.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Artist Kareem-Anthony Ferreira has been in residence at Alice Yard for three weeks in June 2018. On Friday 22 June he will present his current work in progress.

All are invited.

Ferreira writes:

“In my recent work, I re-assign value and purpose to a series of photographs and objects to develop a commentary on traits inherent to my family. My paintings are heavily directed by the accumulation and assemblage of disassociated objects in an effort to delve into the significance of the collections of my family members. These individual found objects are a direct reflection of myself and some family traits. Each painting is individually built up from layers of information and history. The human figure is also another found object that is a vehicle for this exploration. The source materials I am working with are photographs taken at a time of high significance, but I now find these pictures discarded and forgotten. By extracting sections of these photographs and re-assigning value and meaning, I hope to discover the significance of the accumulations in my family.”

Friday, April 20, 2018

A True & Exact History (2018) by writer and artist Sonia Farmer is
an erasure of Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island
of Barbadoes (1657), letterpress-printed. From Thursday 26 April to
Thursday 17 May, it will be installed in the front gallery space at
Granderson Lab, Alice Yard’s adjunct space at 24 Erthig Road, Belmont.

Sonia
Farmer will also appear at the 2018 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, reading from her
book Infidelities (longlisted for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize) on Saturday
28 April:

Island to island
The personal becomes the
political in the poems of UK poet Raymond Antrobus, Bahamian Sonia
Farmer, and Richard Georges of the British Virgin Islands. Chaired by Andre Bagoo
11 am–12 pm • Old Fire Station, Hart Street, Port of SpainFree and open to all

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Most Things Happen When I Am Asleep is an international exhibition bringing together the work of La Agencia from Colombia, Beta-Local from Puerto Rico, Alice Yard from Trinidad and Tobago, TEOR/ética from Costa Rica, and Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society from Indonesia to Artspace NZ.

The exhibition showcases work from these places as well as offering modest proposals on how institutes can evolve, develop and constantly change, actively connecting Aotearoa to the geography and social urgencies of Indonesia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Trinidad and Tobago.

As an internal exercise on the institutional workings of Artspace NZ itself, Most Things Happen When I Am Asleep publicises the work of other “artspaces”, visualising printed and pasted material in the space along with artist proposals, manifestos, moving image work, flyers, and books, arguing that the institute can be understood through artistic work and vice versa. The different knowledges that both artists and institutional bodies produce are blended together to propose three loose themes through which to read artspaces.

The knowledges produced mean to challenge definitions of “institutes” and “grassroots”, and other such categories, diverting attention from ideas like “the source” and “authenticity” to instead focus on flexible and open use. What emerges are liquid methods that produce work by navigating weather, fast changing political realities, education and life’s necessities.

Monday, April 2, 2018

In March 2018, I had the privilege of experiencing Alice Yard outside of what had existed mostly in my imaginary from the beginning of my time studying and writing about contemporary art. As Caribbean practitioners, we are aware of the imperativeness of being able to have cross-regional exchanges in physical spaces, not just virtual. We understand the rarity of these spaces and the fragility of sustainability. Alice Yard was a Trinbagonian pin in a map of mobilisation of contemporary Caribbean artists. A place of possibility where glimpses of actions have been relayed through anecdotes, artist talks, conference panels, journal articles, instagram posts. Going in, I was grateful to share in this process and to have the opportunity to be immersed first hand into the space.

Part of my research is to map out how individuals interpret the word “community” — multiplicities of voices as entry points to a seemingly singular term is a key line of inquiry. During the residency at Alice Yard, the more I spoke to friends, colleagues, and soon-to-be friends, logging their responses to the term, it became apparent that there were strong connections to the term community as a verb rather than a noun. In responses, actions were being described to me, not group identities. The most prominent of these was that time was extended generously by those who facilitate and function in the yard, as well as those I met with beyond the yard periphery. Christopher Cozier, who was in the midst of preparing for his exhibition Occupation As Process at Y Art Gallery, gave immense time to help navigate spaces of interest, from creative production to coffee quality; Sean Leonard, gave so much of his time to connect in the yard and chat; and Nicholas Laughlin, although inundated with deadlines, took the time to support my small project and discuss possibilities of sustainable connections. Beyond the core Alice Yard team, there were also all of the artists, writers, collaborators, curators, organic food producers, people that transcend the parameters of labels, who took the time to visit in the yard, to share their practices and plans and critical discourse, to share sign typography and catalogues and experiences through a road trip to see Trinidad outside of Port of Spain. In a social environment where time is a commodity, the yard space became an alternate social place, an opening of the usual constraints around time.

Sean Leonard, Irénée Shaw, Christopher Cozier, and Nicholas Laughlin

In addition to individual contributions of time and discourse, there was a nucleus of activity that occurred through the yard. There is a the moko jumbie collective 1000 Mokos, run by creatives Kriston Chen and Josh Lu, who aim to build a community of stilt walkers in Port of Spain. The yard acts as the physical terrain for experimentation, with kids and adults exercising trust in themselves and each other to hone skills in the cultural practice of stilt walking. Christopher Cozier’s exhibition included “actions” — installations of play around the Woodbrook area, whether that was three men shifting a concrete headstone into the yard, or pasting a breezeblock work on a wall — expanding the scope of artistic display well into the public sphere.

There were anonymous wall drawings in the communal spaces at Alice Yard, archives of previous encounters — no one seemed to know how they appeared but everyone embraced them. During the facilitation of a “research yard,” the Annex became a community reading room for a weekend, with a mini library containing texts contributed by artists, academics, collectives. Through all of these encounters, it seemed then that community was not really being articulated through identifying groups, but through action by groups. It was the brotherhood of shifting a concrete block from one area of Woodbrook to another for an artistic process; it was the contribution of publications by colleagues to unknown audiences in an open space; it was trusting a stranger to hold you as you tentatively stagger on two-foot wooden stilts to connect with a collective subconscious of a cultural practice.

It was the sharing of joint ambitions with museum colleagues working in Government-led and community-led institutions. It was learning aspects of vernacular through signs, through encountering new yard spaces as cultural hubs, such as East Yard. And mostly, it was the exchange of words — over coffee made by a “grumpy man,” accompanying a mural-in-progress, through the grounds of a sister university, in the middle of a christophene field among giants of nature. Community was openness to possibility through offering of space for pan-Caribbean connections.

My experience was one of many residencies and projects that Alice Yard facilitates, and to me the value of this collision of the imaginary with actuality is the immense humanising of space and discourse. This is something that can get lost among the screen conversations and images that often leave us in existential disconnects, sometimes turning to Anglophone Caribbean postcolonial theory to make sense of what we encounter. Our postcolonial heroes for the most part were advocating for travel, for being physically present, sitting in rooms together, carving spaces of connections. There is a Lloyd Best interview where he emphasises that the importance of a lecture series UWI held in the 1950s was not so much the content provided by presenters, but that a space was financed for young faculty members’ discussions, a space that to Best “really accelerated the process of consciousness, because they paid for the rum and everything. And it really made the campus what it became, which was the eleventh country, what was in fact, an extra country in the federation and that would become important later when the federation broke up.”

In the place where CARICOM doesn’t always equate Caribbean unity, and post-independence nationalism segregates resources for artistic exchanges, Alice Yard can be read as an iteration of prospect through Best’s reading of the “eleventh country” — one of a handful of physical spaces for cross-regional engagement and camaraderie in the Caribbean. We are living and working through constant conditionings of dehumanisation, through the transmission of connections via virtual filters. Alice Yard invites us to suspend that reliance and provides the space (and sometimes the rum) for opening our discourses in our respective practices, for opening the possibilities of exchanges, to generate and sustain more pockets of community as action, of eleventh countries.

Barbadian curator and researcher, Natalie McGuire's work focuses on community-driven critical discourse in culture, through repositioning frameworks of research on Caribbean art, as well as digitally housed creative exchange projects. Currently a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the UWI Cave Hill, Natalie is also the Assistant Curator Social History and Engagement at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, and has coordinated exchange projects and exhibitions for platforms such as Fresh Milk, CARIFESTA, The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Gallery NuEdge. In 2015 she was the art writer in residence for Caribbean Linked III, and has contributed articles for ARC Magazine, AICA SC, MOKO Magazine, Caribbean Beat, as well as artist exhibition catalogues.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Artist Martin Solymar has been at residence at Alice Yard for the past two weeks. On the evening of Wednesday 29 November, he will present a series of new works created in Trinidad, and give an informal talk.

All are invited.

Interests in music, nature, mythology, ghosts, and the construction of narratives are all at play in Solymar’s works. During his stay in Trinidad — divided between Port of Spain and Blanchisseuse — he has spent much of his time observing people and their interactions with social spaces and each other. He considers the resulting artworks to be “person to person” conversations with meanings encrypted by experiences and memory. His fascination with intersections between his own Norse heritage and Caribbean folklore takes form in a series of runes — not carved in stone, but constructed from natural found materials — installed at Alice Yard alongside painting and sculptures.

About the artist:

Martin Solymar (b. 1981) is a Swedish artist who operates within the fields of painting and sculpture. He took his Masters in Fine Arts at the Valand Academy in 2012, and is based in Gothenburg. He has a keen interest in the Caribbean and trying to find focal points in Norse mythology and Caribbean folklore..

.Alice Yard is the backyard space of the house at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

This was once the house of Sean Leonard’s great-grandmother. Four generations of children played and imagined in this yard, and now we continue this tradition. Alice Yard is a space for creative experiment, collaboration, and improvisation.

Alice Yard is administered and curated by architect Sean Leonard, artist Christopher Cozier, and writer and editor Nicholas Laughlin, with the help of a growing network of creative collaborators. Read more about us here. Alice Yard is a non-profit organisation incorporated under the laws of Trinidad and Tobago.

Since 2008, Alice Yard has run a residency programme hosting artists, curators, and other creative practitioners. Find out more here.